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To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

Author Robin Coste Lewis
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Hardcover
$35.00 US
Knopf
On sale Dec 06, 2022 | 384 Pages | 978-1-5247-3258-5
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  • English > Comparative Literature: American > African American Poetry
  • English > Literature > American Literature – African American
  • English > Literature > American Literature – Poetry
  • About
  • Awards
  • Author
Winner of the Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry


Robin Coste Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images from her family stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.


Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. These photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. 

In what she calls “a film for the hands” and “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: “Black pages, black space, black time—the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”

“The exquisite To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Lewis’s elegiac and haunted volume . . . is another voyage. But the view is different, as is the destination: what Lewis is resuscitating here is a community, a family she knew or wishes she’d known.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
 
“Lewis weaves a documentary poetic work. Evident from the opening pages, one of the central interests of this exceptional collection is migration: ‘Signs and marks/ and nothing/ with which to apprentice them.// Evolution—/ the migration/ of imagination—// the image just/ illusion: a profound, prehistoric/ technology of leaving.’ The pairing of photographs and text expand existing notions of how any single artistic medium or form can capture the nuances of race, family, and history. Shining with Lewis’s trademark lyricism and fueled by resonant and inspired juxtapositions, this exquisite book makes an impact worth sharing widely and rereading.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother’s bed only days before the house was slated to be razed. A sense of loss and near-loss pervades the book. The photopoem does more than preserve—it provokes, mourns, philosophizes, yearns, and celebrates, much like the jazz of Lewis’s ancestral Louisiana. . . . Its achievement is cosmic and sonic.” —Kevin Young, The New Yorker
 
“To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness is a hybrid text concerned with the recent past and excavating what Lewis calls deep time—millennia of Black art-making, community-building and innovation. To accomplish this excavation, Lewis arranges photos she discovered 25 years ago in a suitcase at her grandmother’s home so that they are in conversation with her own layered, lush poetry. The result is a book steeped in a particular history—Black migrants from Louisiana living in Los Angeles in the 20th century—yet buoyed by a feeling of boundlessness.” —Angela Flournoy, The Los Angeles Times
  
“Juxtapositions of text and photograph spark unexpected electric arcs, illuminating the photographic subjects’ inner lives . . . Lewis's language has a washed clarity. . . . At once authoritative and piercingly human, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness is an extraordinary atlas for an unmapped world.” —Sylee Gore, The Poetry Foundation
  • WINNER | 2023
    NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • WINNER | 2023
    NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • WINNER | 2023
    NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • WINNER | 2023
    PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
  • WINNER | 2023
    PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
  • WINNER | 2023
    PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
© Abigail Rudner
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, her first collection of poetry. The book was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and it was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Literary Hub named it one of the best books of the last twenty years. She is also the coauthor, with Kevin Young, of Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, Lewis holds a PhD in Poetry and Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, an MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a BA from Hampshire College in post-colonial literature and creative writing. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and The Massachusetts Review. Lewis has taught at Hampshire College, Hunter College, Wheaton College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. She is currently writer in residence at the University of Southern California.


ROBIN COSTE LEWIS is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit prhspeakers.com. View titles by Robin Coste Lewis

About

Winner of the Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry


Robin Coste Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images from her family stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.


Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. These photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. 

In what she calls “a film for the hands” and “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: “Black pages, black space, black time—the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”

“The exquisite To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Lewis’s elegiac and haunted volume . . . is another voyage. But the view is different, as is the destination: what Lewis is resuscitating here is a community, a family she knew or wishes she’d known.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
 
“Lewis weaves a documentary poetic work. Evident from the opening pages, one of the central interests of this exceptional collection is migration: ‘Signs and marks/ and nothing/ with which to apprentice them.// Evolution—/ the migration/ of imagination—// the image just/ illusion: a profound, prehistoric/ technology of leaving.’ The pairing of photographs and text expand existing notions of how any single artistic medium or form can capture the nuances of race, family, and history. Shining with Lewis’s trademark lyricism and fueled by resonant and inspired juxtapositions, this exquisite book makes an impact worth sharing widely and rereading.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother’s bed only days before the house was slated to be razed. A sense of loss and near-loss pervades the book. The photopoem does more than preserve—it provokes, mourns, philosophizes, yearns, and celebrates, much like the jazz of Lewis’s ancestral Louisiana. . . . Its achievement is cosmic and sonic.” —Kevin Young, The New Yorker
 
“To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness is a hybrid text concerned with the recent past and excavating what Lewis calls deep time—millennia of Black art-making, community-building and innovation. To accomplish this excavation, Lewis arranges photos she discovered 25 years ago in a suitcase at her grandmother’s home so that they are in conversation with her own layered, lush poetry. The result is a book steeped in a particular history—Black migrants from Louisiana living in Los Angeles in the 20th century—yet buoyed by a feeling of boundlessness.” —Angela Flournoy, The Los Angeles Times
  
“Juxtapositions of text and photograph spark unexpected electric arcs, illuminating the photographic subjects’ inner lives . . . Lewis's language has a washed clarity. . . . At once authoritative and piercingly human, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness is an extraordinary atlas for an unmapped world.” —Sylee Gore, The Poetry Foundation

Awards

  • WINNER | 2023
    NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • WINNER | 2023
    NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • WINNER | 2023
    NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
  • WINNER | 2023
    PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
  • WINNER | 2023
    PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
  • WINNER | 2023
    PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Author

© Abigail Rudner
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, her first collection of poetry. The book was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and it was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Literary Hub named it one of the best books of the last twenty years. She is also the coauthor, with Kevin Young, of Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, Lewis holds a PhD in Poetry and Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, an MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a BA from Hampshire College in post-colonial literature and creative writing. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and The Massachusetts Review. Lewis has taught at Hampshire College, Hunter College, Wheaton College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. She is currently writer in residence at the University of Southern California.


ROBIN COSTE LEWIS is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit prhspeakers.com. View titles by Robin Coste Lewis

Additional formats

  • To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    Robin Coste Lewis
    978-0-593-50165-8
    $12.50 US
    Audiobook Download
    Random House Audio
    Jul 11, 2023
  • To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    Robin Coste Lewis
    978-1-5247-3259-2
    $18.99 US
    Ebook
    Knopf
    Dec 06, 2022
  • To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    Robin Coste Lewis
    978-0-593-50165-8
    $12.50 US
    Audiobook Download
    Random House Audio
    Jul 11, 2023
  • To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness
    Robin Coste Lewis
    978-1-5247-3259-2
    $18.99 US
    Ebook
    Knopf
    Dec 06, 2022

Other Books by this Author

  • Voyage of the Sable Venus
    Voyage of the Sable Venus
    and Other Poems
    Robin Coste Lewis
    978-1-101-91120-4
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Knopf
    Nov 21, 2017
  • Voyage of the Sable Venus
    Voyage of the Sable Venus
    and Other Poems
    Robin Coste Lewis
    978-1-101-91120-4
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Knopf
    Nov 21, 2017
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